'Make a stand for independent, creative film making in a world where the pressures of conformism and commercialism are becoming more powerful every day'
Lindsay Anderson.

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Baby Love.

Edinburgh born
Alastair Reid’s debut feature film was described with a typical piece of 60’s
speak as ‘a daringly contemporary film on
the conflicts between generations conducted with the weapons of sex’[1].
Today it would, as David Kerekes remarks, be seen as a cavalier depiction of a subject
matter that would be considered risqué or taboo. In the case of Baby
Love (1968) the taboo nature of the subject would be underage children
in the proximity to sex and even sexual danger. In this story Luci, the debut
role of 15-year-old Linda Hayden who went on to make sexploitation films
including Expose
(1975), is not simply exposed to sex but is the actual sexual predator seducing
all three members of a wealthy middle class metropolitan family, think Theorem
(1968) although the predator in the Pasolini movie is certainly not under the age
of consent!

Luci's mother played by Diana Dors.

The 15 year old Nymphet.

Based on a
novel of the same name by Tina Chad Christian, Luci comes home from school to
find that her mother, played mainly in flashback by the formidable Diana Dors,
has committed suicide and is lying dead in the bathhouse out back and that she is
now an orphan! Robert (Keith Barron), a well to-do Doctor and ex lover of her
mothers, has agreed to take the young working class Liverpudlian into his large
well appointed home on the banks of the Thames in London. One suspects this is
more to do with guilt about abandoning her mother than his paternal feelings.
Luci is no fool’ gradually working her charms on all three members of the
family, including mother Amy and son Nick, who is about the same age as
Luci.

The seduction of Amy begins....

....and son Nicky who is driven to distraction by the new lodger.

Where in a
film article today would you find the description of a 15 year old as ‘prepubescent and provocative’[2] and the deliberate
sexualisation of a schoolgirl when a successful married man brings a young nymphet
into the family home where she uses her only strength to bring about the down
fall of his family, seducing the mother, playing sexual games with their son
and bringing vengeance to the father who she see’s as deliberately abandoning
her now deceased mother.

A frustrated man attempt the rape of his wife!

When this film
was made it was not illegal to take photographs of naked children or to sell
them. The law changed in 1978 when The
Protection of Children Act became law and as Kerekes goes on to say in his
article, under this act Baby Love
could not be made today given the scenes of a naked under age child having
simulated sex on screen. As I have said in previous 60’s blogs this time period
is interesting mainly because attitudes were completely different than they are
today and Reid’s movie is a prime example. But even so there was no reason to
interject soft porn music to emphasise the films more erotic moments, I think
your spot them for your selves!